Begining and Beginning and Beginning

Making art and for that matter any creative endevour is a series of beginnings again and again. Empowering yourself to do just that is the interesting (and sometimes hard) bit. It's also the joy and the rush and the compelling part of it.

I sorted all the issues with my Ripples image the weekend before last - but it's not there yet. It needs the mystery added back into the image, so it's a work in progress at the moment and I'm waiting for the time to begin to work on it again. I'm thinking I need to hide bits of it - to reveal and conceal and to add more surface texture. At the moment the focus is the line (no bad thing) but by itself the line is obscuring the message to the viewer because it's all there is, and it's strong. In short - the painting's not finished !

I heard an incredible sound performance by Jeff Henderson at the Govett Brewster Gallery (Sound/Bodies winter lecture series) in New Plymouth last weekend.
To me it was an aural version of the concept of stripping out the interstitial spaces and collapsing what's left into a whole new image/pattern. It was as if the audience experienced the artist as he was calling to someone from two hills away and bits of his sentences were lost in the atmosphere across the distance. Vocally the sounds we heard were no longer whole pieces of language - just the upper and lower registers of vocal expression rendering partial words from afar (but without the dopler effect).
It was so exciting to HEAR a rendering of the sound concept of the idea I've been playing around with. Made me realise I could have done it so much better with the pleated canvas ... and that I need to revisit the idea and add back the sense of space I've lost through so much use of colour. I was so inspired I wan tto begin again!!